Ed Miliband’s marathon speech to the Labour party conference was called 'a
game changer’. So what’s different?

The anxiety was clear to see on the faces of Labour delegates as they shuffled slowly into the auditorium on Tuesday afternoon.

For weeks, Ed Miliband’s party conference speech in Manchester had been billed as the moment when the leader of the Opposition needed to show the nation who he is and what he stands for.

His party may have opened up a significant poll lead over David Cameron’s Conservatives, but many voters do not know enough about Mr Miliband or his policies to shepherd Labour back into Downing Street in just over two and a half years’ time.

The great Miliband identity crisis has allowed the Labour leader’s critics to portray him as either “Red Ed”, the trade union lackey, or an intellectual policy “wonk” out of touch with the British public.

Some have argued that the GMB’s Paul Kenny, Unite’s Len Mcluskey and other union barons are the true power behind Labour’s throne. For others, it is Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor and once Mr Miliband’s senior when the pair worked for Gordon Brown, who is the man in control of the Opposition.

Labour’s leader has even been dogged by unflattering comparisons with the plasticine canine Gromit and the monosyllabic Forrest Gump.

“He’s had a difficult start,” said one member of the shadow cabinet, hours before his leader’s speech. “We have had to accept a lot of people holding us responsible for the state of the economy. They just haven’t wanted to listen to us.”

Last year Mr Miliband’s speech was heavily criticised for veering to the Left, bashing bankers and damning some businesses as “predators”. Could it be different this year?

Could Mr Miliband rouse his party and fill his identity vacuum? And could he turn up the heat on David Cameron and his gaffe-prone Government ahead of this week’s Tory conference?

Gordon Brown may have been Mr Miliband’s political master in office, but this was a speech that owed more in style to Tony Blair. For more than 70 minutes, the Labour leader spoke without notes, autocue or even a lectern. Gone was the imploring, even hectoring, style of last year’s speech. He looked relaxed, ready to crack the odd self-deprecating joke as he talked of his family and their origins in Eastern Europe.

But the nervous mood of the audience persisted – perhaps because Mr Miliband had said much of this before. It was not until the first of the two themes started to emerge that the auditorium began to believe they were witnessing something more ambitious.

This paved the way for a move to the centre ground, in which Mr Miliband acknowledged the squeeze on living standards characterised by the soaring cost of energy, petrol, food and rail travel – which had, he said, “left people at the mercy of forces beyond their control”.

While he admitted Labour had been too soft on immigration, there was no such acknowledgement of the mistakes that exacerbated the economic crisis. He played to the crowd, lambasting bankers and Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul.

“This is my faith”, he told the audience, using much more direct language than the clunky policy of “pre-distribution” he spoke of last month.

If Mr Miliband’s delivery looked relaxed, that was because this was one of the most practised political speeches of recent times.

While Gordon Brown would tinker frantically with his speeches until minutes before taking the stage, Mr Miliband’s words were largely written more than a month ago.

At the end of August, the Labour leader flew to Greece for his first two-week holiday since 2009. Determined to recharge, think and spend time with his wife and two children, he even left behind his mobile phone.

On his return, aides were surprised to be told that the conference speech had already been written. There then began hour after hour of practice necessary to ensure Mr Miliband memorised more than an hour of material. Anna Yearley, who runs his political office, would at times endure three renditions of the speech in a single day.

The practice seemed to pay off. On Tuesday night, in bars and cafes around the conference centre, the mood of Labour MPs and activists was buoyant. A national newspaper editor sent a text to Mr Miliband that described the speech as a “game changer”.

One relentlessly dour parliamentarian, despite being close to Mr Miliband, only ever dishes out the word “fine” as praise. This time even she was moved to say that the speech was “better than fine”.

Even before this conference, a challenge to Mr Miliband’s leadership before the 2015 election looked unlikely. This speech has only further unified the party. Those in the shadow cabinet close to David Miliband were noticeably reticent when asked about the former foreign secretary’s political ambitions. Intriguingly, Ed Miliband’s close associates are suggesting that the leader’s brother may be asked to lead the party’s general election campaign.

But among delegates in the crammed bar of the nearby Midland hotel until the early hours of Wednesday morning, there were many doubters – including some within the shadow cabinet.

The most damaging criticism is that Mr Miliband delivered little in the way of new policy. Shortly after the speech, one senior shadow minister admitted that the speech was “light” on policy. He seemed unconvinced that there was enough detail to move the political debate on.

While the one-nation ideal may chime with Britain’s post-Olympic glow, it remains to be seen whether this is a concept that will gain any more traction than David Cameron’s Big Society.

Some voters may feel the concept clashes with Mr Miliband’s previous attempts to stoke class war, by lambasting Mr Cameron and other senior Tories for their private education.

The other big challenge will be convincing millions of voters that the Labour leader’s political heart really does lie in the centre.

Privately, Mr Miliband’s team say they are determined to make a land grab for the centre ground. “David Cameron’s Tories are lurching off to the Right to appease their back benchers and block the Ukip threat,” explains one adviser. “The Lib Dems are in tatters – what are they going to win at the next election? Fifteen seats? So, that leaves the centre ground wide open for us.”

He may have taken care to refer to delegates as “friends” during his speech, but within hours this son of a Marxist historian was referring to members as “comrades” during a more intimate question and answers session.

It looked like the veil was slipping. Would Tony Blair, the prototype for any Labour politician trying to snatch the centre ground, have made such a mistake? Mr Miliband’s decision to attend an anti-cuts march organised by the TUC on October 20 may not enamour those trying to rebrand him as the man in the middle ground to wavering voters.

Yes, there may have been a fracas with the unions in Manchester over Labour’s support for the Coalition’s curbs on public sector pay, but the Leader of the Opposition is too dependent on union money to escape their clutches.

There was also the claim that Mr Miliband had failed to set himself apart from the murky world of Westminster, which much of the electorate still feel remains sullied by petty squabbling, point scoring and the Parliamentary expenses scandal.

In what politicos refer to as the “anti-politics age”, Mr Miliband has looked unlikely to set himself apart in a way that would power apathetic voters to the polls.

One councillor in south London despaired at the sniping at Tories during the speech. At one point, Mr Miliband engineered three hisses for Michael Gove, the Education Secretary.

“That sort of stuff is a massive turn-off for voters,” he said. “He doesn’t understand we need to build a new politics free from Punch and Judy stuff.”

Nevertheless, confidence and momentum are vital in politics and Labour’s strategists think they now have them.

Party insiders talk of a two-stage policy: first, getting the Tory-led Coalition to “own failure”. This process, they say, is already far more advanced than they thought it would be due to the Budget “omnishambles”, the faltering economic recovery and last week’s chaos over the West Coat Main Line rail franchise. “The Tories are retoxifying themselves faster than we ever hoped,” said one source.

The second stage is ensuring Labour’s “own change” – that they become seen as a Government in waiting.

“We’ve moved the ball forward this week,” says one shadow cabinet figure. “It’s progress, but there is still much to be done. You don’t get many one-term governments. This is a war of attrition – and we’ve only just started.”

Few doubt Mr Miliband’s 2012 conference speech will be remembered for years and that he has fired a shot across Tory bows with plenty to exercise Conservative jaws and brains in Birmingham in the coming days.

But it will be months – not days – before we know if this is the “game changer” Labour needs it to be. Mr Miliband shored up his position in Manchester last week. He set his party on a new path to the centre of Britain’s political landscape. We saw what the Labour leader wants us to believe he is – we are little wiser about his true identity.